Posted on Thursday 5th of October 2006 at 05:47 in Software

Vista can wait

Those who know me will know that I finally got around to installing Vista RC1 on my desktop machine and have had quite the journey with it.

Initially I was impressed. It looked polished, professional, gleaming... But living with it for a bit longer highlighted the areas where my objections sit, and while it looks very nice and all I shall not be getting Vista when it is launched.

Initial Thoughts
The installation was slower than an afternoon watching Titanic with your grandparents and offered minimal hints as to what it was doing to your system. I appreciate the need to hide information from low end users but I value my computer and I like to know what is being done to it, a progress bar telling me "something" is happening is just not good enough. At least XP told you what area it was installing. Once installed it was quite a nice experience - the UI improvements over XP are clear - albeit that I find them scary because I'm so utterly dependant on the way XP is laid out when I'm in a Windows environment.

Then My Computer Started to Sweat
Well, not sweat but curiosity peaked and I had to examine the impact Vista was having on my resources. Firstly I examined my install (I'd given it a generous 30gb partition under the notion that if I liked it, I would need space to install favourite software etc for daily use.), which showed that 17gb had been eaten during install. That is a lot of space. Even God would consider that a lot of space and he knows his shit. I then opened the hardware monitor gadget/widget/whatever and it showed that at idle 32% of my ram was being used. 32% of 2gb I might add. Carry the one, divide the square... that's around 647mb of ram when idle. My XP machine uses less when running Tomcat/ServuFTP/postgreSQL/etc. Not a great start.

But Reflecting...
I remember the step up from 98se to XP - that was quite the increase in resources as well so maybe I'm being unfair? Well, frankly no I'm not. I need my Operating system to work and Vista doesn't because of one painful word. Drivers. Without putting too fine a label on it, it's a mess. Whatever MS claim, the drivers will be an un-optimised mess for a long time yet, probably a good while after launch too. If the drivers are naff it isn't an option. I need my gaming, my music, my stability and I don't see Vista as being able to offer that for a while. I'm happy with how my XP system works for now and I'm not willing to sell my worldly belongings just to afford the basic package that only lets you use it on a Monday (or whatever restrictions they place on the basic home package).

In Conclusion
It was an exciting prospect and it started badly, got better and then smashed into a cliff. I value my music so much that if my Creative X-Fi card doesn't work properly then it doesn't deserve my time. It ate my RAM, chewed on my hard drive and just sat smiling at me as the CPU meter rose and dropped like a heart monitor. Vista is not for me until it's settled down (and been released, obviously).

 

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